On the Cause of Loneliness

i. On Insomnia, And In Which An Idea Reveals Itself

I've been having trouble sleeping lately, and I don't really know why. I mean, there has to be some reason for being like this, right?

I know that I usually suffer from self-imposed insomnia, meaning that the tons of schoolwork I have to do just don't leave me with any time for decent sleep: my typical weekday night would be spent typing (or if I'm lucky, just editing) an average of ten to twenty pages for some major paper that was due the next day, or maybe studying at least five chapters of a thick textbook for an upcoming exam. But I'm currently having a relatively light week in terms of school work - meaning that I only have one major exam, one major presentation, and one major paper this week (the calm before the storm, perhaps?) - and yet I still can't seem to get enough quality sleep to lift me out of my general state of lethargy when the sun's up.

Ah, but I digress - and so early on in this entry, if I may note.

What I want to say (I think) is that my periodic bouts of insomnia lead me to often epiphanic periods of reflection; I mean, hell, I wouldn't want to spend hour upon hour of tossing and turning in bed being unproductive, would I? And thus I often spend the wee hours of the morning thinking about stuff.

I went to bed last night at around two in the morning (my first Tuesday isn't until one-thirty in the afternoon), and despite changing positions at least a dozen times, I didn't get to finally doze off until the sun rose. And so I spent at least four hours thinking about the same thing that I had been thinking of these past few sleepless nights (which itself is a product of certain recent conversations I had with some close friends) - that people our age don't seem to experience magic anymore; yet, they long to feel it more than anything else. And thus they spend the rest of their lives on a fruitless search to feel magic again but never really succeed. This, friends, is the reason for loneliness.

ii. An Attempt at An Explanation

I think it's best to start out by saying that I had a very happy childhood.

Picture this: I was a fat and bouncy little boy (but not fat-disgusting; rather, it was more of fat-adorable - my cousins used to call me applecheeks in an I-want-to-squeeze-you-until-you-suffocate kind of way), and was unfortunate enough to be the only one among my siblings to inherit my father's myopia, leading to me having to wear glasses at the rather early age of nine years old.

In other words, I looked like a fat nerd and played the part.

Being the firstborn kid, I was the object of experimentation of my parents (a rather boring combination of an accountant and a physician), who decided to rear me - for the early part of my life at least - on hundreds of books, Sixties music, and a series of supposedly-English-speaking-but-decidedly-not yayas from the Visayas.

My parents both had nine-to-five jobs, so my formative years were spent reading classics and encyclopedias (I wasn't allowed to watch TV at that age, except for Batibot and Sesame Street), running amok on the streets of Parañaque, watching rented Disney movies on Betamax, and learning English from my yayas. My parents enjoy telling me a story about one evening when they came home from work to find a two-year-old me practically peeing in my diapers to tell them about something I had learned from my yaya that day:

Me: Mami, Dadi, my name is JeeJee (my family calls me JayJay)! The kulur (color) of an epol (apple) is reed (red), and look - I'm holding a fidder (feather)! See, a fidder, a fidder!

Yaya: Yees, veery gud JeeJee! Yur doing gud! Ate, Kuya, ako po nagturo sa kanya! Ang galing po no?

Mom and Dad: [after a long pause] Ahh, oo. Magaling nga. [Trying to stifle laughter]

So yes, English was the first language I learned to read, write, and speak in (I know I'm not as fluent in spoken English as I used to be - blame Zobel for the poor English it taught in 1991, as well as for exposing me to exclusively Tagalog-speaking classmates), and this meant that I didn't make a lot of friends in preschool and grade school. My peers spent recess time talking about UltraMan or BioMan, while I tried in vain to tell them about Aslan the Lion, the Swiss Family Robinson, or Robin Hood.

But I didn't really care back then. All I knew was that I had a new book to get lost in every week, an entire house to play make-believe in with my brother Michael, a big enough garden to dig up insects and worms in, a near enough neighborhood playground to run to after school, enough paper airplane and origami books to keep me busy on rainy days, and enough toys to make up for my relative lack of friends. All these made me the happiest boy that there ever could be. My world was one of dinosaurs, make-believe wizard friends, imaginary trips to other planets, and detailed schemes of wondrous new machines that I drew up, and everything in it was novel, exciting, mysterious, and yes - magical.

[Digression: It's sad how little boys nowadays don't read about dinosaurs and planets and stars as much as my generation used to. Or how they don't spend time biking, climbing trees, or doing stuff outdoors anymore. They're just growing up too quickly. I think cable TV and the Internet are to blame. What do you think?]

And thus, this is the magic that I'm referring to: the feeling of wonder and excitement that you get when you realize that there's a whole world out there to discover and explore, as well as the knowledge that you face it brave, optimistic, naked, and inexperienced.

iii. And Thus An Attempt at an Exposition

My puberty announced itself with an unexpected outburst of hair in places I never thought it could grow in, as well as a sudden revelation that girls - who I never thought I could actually understand - were actually interesting, pretty things.

It also seemed that the experimentation my parents did on me when I was younger paid off quite well, because the sheer amount of stock knowledge I had built up meant that I never had to study seriously during the whole of high school, thus leaving me all of my time for dealing with newly-discovered things.

Anyway, my first growth spurt, at the age of thirteen, came with a rather dramatic loss of weight, as well as with a realization that I had inherited a not-too-bad set of genes from my parents. In other words, I found that girls could actually like me (initially at least), and that I could like them back - and rather shamefully I admit that this, friends, was the driving force of my adolescence (I know I'm not alone, you know). Yeah, I still read at least one book a week, still built complicated cars and machines from Lego with my siblings, knew how to assemble a computer from scratch, and spent hundreds of hours playing Fallout 2 - but this was all at home, away from the prying, critical eyes of people who were often too quick to judge character.

And yet, the magic now seemed to reveal itself - not too immaturely, I hope - as the thrill of the chase, or in the uncertainty of baring your heart to another person and hoping that she sees the same thing that you see in her. This whole thing was novel and exciting, and that made me love it.

Everything went well initially (because in hindsight, I now realize that girls were as inexperienced with this sort of thing as I was), but I soon found out that despite the outward physical change, I was still a geek at heart. True, I had found my athletic niche (it turns out I was good at pummelling people on the mat), discovered that I had the discipline to work out (yes, I was actually quite buff back in high school; now I'm just plain beefy), and found myself using a series of extremely effective perfumes, but these couldn't change the fact that I just didn't know how to act around people.

I was more comfortable in the classroom breezing through exams than going out on group dates with girls (Remember how, back in the early part of high school, we went out on class excursions after quarterly exams to watch a movie and eat dinner out? And all the guys - often from the same clique - who liked girls - also from just one clique - bought them roses or stuffed animals and whisked them away to a scenic corner of the mall to profess their undying love for them); I was still more comfortable talking to my good friends about white dwarves and black holes, Greek mythology, and car specs than trying to woo a girl over the phone (while listening to Sunday Slowdown on 89.9, of course). And well, being used to going to kiddie parties to simply run amok among the confused smaller children, I wasn't really good at the whole going-to-the-school-dance-in-your-swankiest-outfit (which was, back then, a long-sleeved polo tucked into your best pleated khaki slacks, topped off with shiny brown leather shoes and your lucky boxers) and-asking-the-girl-you-like-to-slow-dance thing.

And thus this led to the inevitable series of girls-you-thought-you-were-in-love-with, dozens of failed courtship attempts, and an equal number of minor heartbreaks, all serving to lead up to the sudden appearance of the one girl (okay - maybe two or three) who comes along to sweep you off your feet, makes you forget about everyone else in your past, and makes you feel totally helpless. In my case, it was my best friend in Junior year (you know who you are), and I guess that I was lucky that she accepted me for the geek that I was.

We didn’t get together, but I guess she was responsible for making me realize that the magic I was talking about earlier still existed in its full extent, and that it was basically still the same feeling as before, only a lot less selfish. There was still a whole world out there to explore and conquer; only this time I had someone to rule it with. And I knew that had to face it with anxiety, uncertainty, and apprehension; only this time I knew that I didn’t have to face it alone. That made all the difference.

iii. The Crisis of Growing Up (Complete with Illustrations)

I hope that rather long and honest discussion of my past served to help you understand my definition of what I perceive magic to be. I hope you don't misread me by thinking that it's just some cheesy definition that love (or something like it) makes me feel.

For the purpose of the next few paragraphs, I'm going to reiterate what magic is: a general sense of wonder or awe regarding the world and your personal future which leads to a feeling of excitement and courage to face the world openly as the person you are.

Now, my main point is that people our age generally do not feel this magic anymore, not because we have stopped believing in it, but because we simply cannot afford to anymore. Such an attitude does not lend itself kindly to college or working life - all that matters now is having to meet deadlines, attaining independence and financial stability, or meeting short-term goals in order to gain that elusive long-term goal. We've all had to assume this pragmatic, adult mindset because we simply can't waste time dreaming anymore; after all, we've all already got these visions of what we want to be, we already know how to get there, and well, we're not getting any younger, are we? Hence we simply can't afford to make any mistakes anymore.

And well, maybe it's just me, but everything's reducible to mere numbers now - like how even the most complicated computer programs can be reduced to a series of ones and zeroes, or how employees of a multinational company are simply a set of productivity and profitability measures, or how seemingly random events are caused by a set of stochastic variables that can be forecasted using simple regression analysis. It's just not fun anymore.

And well, to put things bluntly - things by themselves don't seem to be magical anymore. Dinosaurs are now simply huge reptiles produced by the process of evolution, made extinct by the failure to adapt to a changing climate; Stars are simply orbs of hydrogen and helium that emit light because of continuous fusion reactions, and twinkle because their light has to pass through our planet's atmosphere; Time travel can never theoretically happen because it requires that an object travel faster than the speed of light - which according to the theory of relativity requires attaining infinite mass. Lewis Carroll - the author of Alice in Wonderland - was a pedophile; Mark Twain - the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn - was a depressed, depressed man; Sigmund Freud was a homosexual (nothing against gay men), sex-crazed fiend; and Ramon Magsaysay wasn't really the protagonist that history has portrayed him to be.

Nothing's new or awe-inducing anymore, and anything relatively novel that you encounter still makes you go, been there, done that.

A Set of Illustrations:

1. Did you ever notice that as a kid you were always so excited to go to the local fast food branch? As a kid growing up in the South, I spent most of the school week longing to go to the nearest McDonald's or KFC branch (which were literally the only fast food chains in the Parañaque/Las Piñas area back then) during the upcoming weekend, and then proceed to feast on their fried chicken whose recipe we couldn't replicate back at home. Well, now I practically eat in Jollibee everyday. Sure, I try their new products once in a while when I'm feeling adventurous, but I generally stick to my trusty two-piece ChickenJoy meal.

2. When you were younger, I'm sure you used to think of alcohol as some major milestone that you had to overcome to prove your maturity to yourself. You were all like, oh shit it's a beer oh no i want to try it but i might get drunk and start singing out loud or whatever it is that drunk people do oh no oh no what the fuck i'll drink it anyway ... blech that was some foul shit but hell i'll finish the bottle anyway. Now we (or at least I) use beer to water down my meals.

This pragmaticism extends itself to relationships with other people as well - you've dealt with almost all kinds of people already and nothing's new anymore. Despite not wanting to objectify people, you can't help but notice that their behavior seems to fall into certain patterns that you can deal with using your own set of behavior patterns.

Another Set of Illustrations:

1. I'm sure most of you men can relate to this. Do you remember the first time you tried courting a girl back in grade school or early high school? I don't know about you, but I sure as hell didn't know how to pull it off back then. I think I made a script that I memorized to tell the embarassed girl how I felt without tripping all over my tongue, complete with I-love-yous and you're-the-best-thing-that-happened-to-mes. Well now, you already know what to do - just tell her, "You know what, you're hot yo!" (I'm kidding, but you get my point right?)

2. Or do you remember the first time you've held a girl's hand? It was like, oh shit oh shit she's in the seat right next to me and her hand's just right there on the armrest next to me argh argh do i have to say anything like "How do you find the movie?" or should I just grab her hand but shit my palm's just to freakin sweaty oh fuck here it goes ... oh shit oh shit I can't believe it I'm actually holding her hand I can die now oh fuck what next? should i squeeze it or what? my hand's going numb fuck. But now, well I'm sure you don't even have to think about it. Get my point?

3. One last example - do you remember your first kiss? I'm sure you were all, here it is here it is oh shit she's looking at my lips does that mean it's time? oh fuck here i'm leaning in she's puckering up oh crap oh crap oh crap should i open my mouth? should i tilt my head like this? oh shit collision Mmmmmmmmmmmmm holy shit my vision went all white that was fucking good but there's drool all over my mouth but what the fuck Mmmmmmmm. "Let's do that again, shall we?". But now, well, you already know how to do it properly, and things just lead to each other, and sooner or later someone's going to say, "Your place or mine?". Where did the uncertainty and the thrill go?

What I'm trying to say is that things just aren't magical anymore, and I believe that all of us, in some way or another, still long for things to be the way they were again. At some point or the other, the future simply won't turn out the way we expected it to be, like how college didn't turn out to be the venue of intellectual discourse and education that I once saw it as, or how being a yuppie suddenly lost all its glamour when I actually started working as a summer intern.

And yet, out of the sheer human ability to hope, we still believe that this magic can happen again, if we work hard enough for it, and so we slave away the rest of our life building up a figurative house that we hope is good enough for magic to inhabit again. And sure - sometimes we manage to invite it in for biscuits and a cup of coffee, but it never stays long enough, and so we try again, and again, and again, only to end up disappointed and lonely in the end.

iv. A Very Vague Conclusion Brought About by Insomnia

I don't know, maybe I'm simply being too pessimistic again. Everything just seems so mundane to me now, and I hate it. I want to discover something new, the way I discovered dinosaurs back when I was way younger. I want to find something to devote my life to, the way I desperately wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, before I found out that I had weak eyes and was too short.

Or maybe I'm just bored.